Normally winning an oscar is a reason for me not to watch something. A friend commented on facebook that this was a fantastic short so finally I clicked. For weeks before hand I had seen the video on vimeo and thought twice about clicking.
Autumn is here and the leaves are turning. It is a good opportunity to go out and take video and photographs of trees and their red and brown leaves.
This was shot with the Sony Xperia Z3. Image stabilisation was on. The mobile phone is so light, and the resolution so high that hand held shots are unrealistic. A tripod, monopod or other tool is needed to stabilise the camera. Sony has developed new technology which should help with image stabilisation. I look forward to seeing how stable Sony Xperia Z5 compact footage will be.
I have spent a few hours this morning and part of this afternoon digitising videos from a few years ago and it’s a time warp. I have one or two fashion shows on tape. I have at least ten theatre pieces. I have two or three field weeks and I have the 2000 graduation trip to Crete on tape. Those are moments that are not just static, in an album. They are alive. They are moving and they are nice to keep.
I would often spend weeks and weeks with the camera on me all the time, whether in a pocket or a bag. I would film life as it happened. I have a pre-show video of the Ramayana. I have a video of post-Ramayana drinks when the characters are still in character. I have some of the best nights I’ve spent in geneva on tape. I also have conversations.
Does anyone remember the suction pump s****tal scratcher? Do you remember why people were perplexed? I do. It’s on tape and I want to digitise and share them with the people concerned because they are nice to have and there’s a guaranteed laugh that would ensue. There are about 22yrs of my life on video and the past decade is shot mainly by myself.
At one party I was busy and someone filmed me whilst I was occupied with what I was doing. I can see how I appear to other people. I can also see how other people interact. It’s from a barbecue video that was had at home. That video won’t be going online anytime soon, in fact, there’s little chance of others seeing it.
It’s great to go through your own video archive, seeing your life as it happened whilst still a teenager. I’m going to go through some more tapes now, to find some footage that may have relevance to my showreel. It’s the turn of the Tanzania footage now.
When I was in Spain I started to read “The Bomber War” because it’s a topic I do not know much about the topic. It’s interesting to read about the technology that they used for guidance, for detection and for the bombing. It’s also to read about how one thousand bomber sorties were sometimes orchestrated. I’m only 40 per cent of the way through the book at the time of writing.
While reading the Bomber War I also watched a French documentary available on curioisitystream called Bombing War: From Guernica to Hiroshima“. It is a two-part documentary looking at bombing, from the experimental bombing of Guernica and the request for bombing not to target civilians to the bombing of London, Berlin and many cities in between. It takes a look at what motivated the change in bombing tactic.
By the end of the documentary, I thought that they should have addressed the cultural cost of bombing Europe. Plenty of beautiful old cities were destroyed in such a manner that we now travel to specific towns to see what Europe looked like before the Second World War and its bombing campaigns.
One sentence from the second documentary that may stick with you is that it was more dangerous to be in the bombers on their sorties than in the cities that were being bombed. This is due to the air defences, whether Flak, enemy fighters or mid-air collisions.
In the book, we read about the challenges of finding the way to the correct bombing site. They needed to navigate by the stars but also using dead reckoning. Eventually, both sides used beams to guide bombers to and from targets. If you’re interested in technology then the book is worth reading.
Although slightly off-topic the documentaries have some nice images from the war to give you a glimpse of how things looked at the time. It appears that some of the footage was colourised which is both a shame because it becomes a creative representation rather than accurate, and great because it brings certain images to life, making footage easier to interpret.
A topic that I had not come across until watching the second documentary is the dropping of Napalm on Japenese cities with more than 300,000 people, and then on cities of more than 100,000 people. You have images with a percentage of the cities that were destroyed by bombing.
We have seen videos of people slacklining and we have seen videos of people mountainbiking but having a video where we see people slacklining on a bike is less common. This video shows us some beautiful landscapes with cycling somewhere in shot before descending the mountain towards a slackline and crossing. Kenny Belaey managed the feat.
The images are impressive and what makes this edit stand out from others is the way in which we can hear the breathing of the athlete. Those of us who often push ourselves towards our fears are familiar with it. I love the moment when he makes it across and can’t believe it. I’ve had moments where I breathed like that after particularly challenging segments on via ferrata.
He trained for 6-7 months to get the experience and skill required to balance. The making of is interesting. Â The video was shot in La Plagne, France. Spot the drone when he is practicing.
In the near future we will find more and more videos like this, where one extreme sport is combined with another. Pro athletes will have to master more than two sports at a time and so the images will be all the more spectacular. We will see them set up longer slacklines and they will make them longer. It’s about the spectacle. As this variant is in it’s infancy we see the use of safety equipment but in future versions this equipment may be gone.
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